When releasing a hack it's always a good idea to mention what game the hack is for. For those who don't know it's a hack for Konami GB Collection Vol.4 (E) [C][!].

Anyway, I think the walking speed and climbing speed are a bit ridiculous. How about making the climbing speed togglable with a button? Like how you hold a button to slide down faster, have a button make you climb faster. Also, you should see if you can make it boot right into CV 2 on startup rather than go through the same screens as usual. Then we could rename our ROM's to Castlevania II.

Thanks I updated the topic, I kinda threw this hack together quickly. You can manually edit the speeds yourself in a hex editor. Adding the ability to adjust the speed with a button is too much effort for me to bother with.

These should be all the speed hex values that were changed, I can't remember which is which. I'm pretty certain the two in the middle are for rope climbing speeds.

This is a good start. The changes MathUser mentioned would be great additions, but they would require much more effort, yes. The speed seems fine though.

You know, speaking of this game I always wondered how viable it would be to have both the Battle Axe and Holy Cross in the game at once. Not to mention adding in the holy water too. Not to mention adding in the Throwing Knife as well. It would depend on the availability of tile space, and would require the item drop routines be altered to account for the extra sub-weapons too. One can dream, right? ... Or get off my butt and do it myself. lol

This is a good start. The changes MathUser mentioned would be great additions, but they would require much more effort, yes. The speed seems fine though.

You know, speaking of this game I always wondered how viable it would be to have both the Battle Axe and Holy Cross in the game at once. Not to mention adding in the holy water too. Not to mention adding in the Throwing Knife as well. It would depend on the availability of tile space, and would require the item drop routines be altered to account for the extra sub-weapons too. One can dream, right? ... Or get off my butt and do it myself. lol

Yep. By the way this game does have holy water and that boomerang star thing (is that what you mean by cross?), it doesn't have the throwing knife or battle axe.

This is the first time any work at all has been done to this game since the walking speed hack which was posted in 2007. The release of the gb / gbc everdrive hopefully will really help push gameboy romhacking.

I have a couple of fairly simple hacks I'd like to do on GB/GBC games so any advancements in that area are welcome.

Here's an odd idea since it was mentioned about renaming the ROM to CV2. How about simply ripping out all the data that doesn't pertain to CV2 as well as completely skipping the game select menus? Then the data for CV2 could be shifted to the start of the newly empty space and for all intents and purposes you'd have an expanded CV2 ROM for GBC, recalculation of pointers notwithstanding. It would be a good chunk of work, but it's me philosophy that any work that helps make hacking easier for others is worthwhile.

If this were done then at that point this would be ripe for any number of awesome hacks. And the first thing that pops in my head is a remake of CVA. Of course that would also depend heavily on the way the level layouts are coded. The NES CV games are all obstinate bitches when it comes to level editing. Hopefully this game would be more flexible.

Adding in the battle axe would be a good idea cause it's actually useful in this game due to the large size. Daggers never been very useful tho. Skipping the menus alltogether or stripping out the CV2 data is a pretty good idea. You should also make the mudmen brown. They've always been brown, not green.

In case you didn't know, the axe was added into the US version of CV 2: BR. But the holy cross was removed.

I've always considered the Throwing Knife to be a sort of hazard; especially in the older games where you don't drop your old weapon.It's not that useful here due to the screen size being so small, however, being a student of the school of evil game design, I'd put it in JUST as a hazard to the player.

I have a couple of fairly simple hacks I'd like to do on GB/GBC games so any advancements in that area are welcome.

Here's an odd idea since it was mentioned about renaming the ROM to CV2. How about simply ripping out all the data that doesn't pertain to CV2 as well as completely skipping the game select menus? Then the data for CV2 could be shifted to the start of the newly empty space and for all intents and purposes you'd have an expanded CV2 ROM for GBC, recalculation of pointers notwithstanding. It would be a good chunk of work, but it's me philosophy that any work that helps make hacking easier for others is worthwhile.

If this were done then at that point this would be ripe for any number of awesome hacks. And the first thing that pops in my head is a remake of CVA. Of course that would also depend heavily on the way the level layouts are coded. The NES CV games are all obstinate bitches when it comes to level editing. Hopefully this game would be more flexible.

Yeah I looked into that the CV2 data is spread out it's not all in one neat little block. Again, too much effort. If and when the everdrive n8 gets finished having the game by 8mbit is more worth it than the effort to remove the other games.

I tried skipping the menu but it turned out my menu auto start romhack was easier to do. Some important piece of information got loaded somewhere by going through the menu and skipping it made the game crash or in one case start and then glitch out. Also I liked the challenge of programming an auto loading menu.

I really like this game other than the walking and rope climbing speeds. So that's all I'll bother adjusting. Any further changes I welcome you to continue the work.

Yes - I know it is inferior, but I need the prequel to enjoy the sequel...

/dACE

I probably could but I won't bother because I dislike that game. It's a laggy poorly programmed mess. The walking speed of the game seemed fine, it was just laggy. I think I took a look at changing the rope climbing speed but didn't find it in 5-10 minutes and that's about as much time as I'm willing to give up for that game. The lag reminds me a lot of contra force, it just seems like they did a poor job programming it.

Oh, is there one of those in the works? I would have thought the USB 64M Smart Card would have that segment of the market covered.

USB smart card 64 is definitely not a proper solution it doesn't recreate the mbc chips properly. There's a lot of gb / gbc games that don't run at all or crash on the smart card 64. To prove my point even further this castlevania hack crashed on my smart card that's why I did official testing on my devcart that uses the real hardware and it didn't crash.

I have nothing against using a flash device but when testing a romhack having a perfectly accurate hardware recreation is vital. My devcard also uses the battery power as slowly as a regular cartridge where the smart card eats through the battery in record time.

Krikzz did announce he's working on a gb / gbc everdrive and I'm really excited because krikzz really cares about accuracy, quality, and making hardware that uses the least amount of power possible. I really don't think the inaccurate smart card is going to push romhacking since there's a lot of games it wont' even run. Also with a micro sd loading card you can upload the one game instead of having to reflash half the memory every time you want to try little changes to your hack.

Yeah, that's the one. I used to have another version that I restarted and made custom graphics for with all new layouts, but it died along with my harddrive years ago. I still have the layouts I had been working on, so who knows I may revive that thing in the coming year.